


we left them behind

by utrinque_paratus



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: A Shitton Of Original Characters, As far as Lies Sleeping anyways, Basically: The Folly fucked up, Descriptions of Wartime Violence, Ettersberg, F/M, Gen, M/M, Molly only has a short cameo, PTSD, Practically everything is made up because we literally know no hard facts about Nightingales past, Survivor Guilt, This is dark stuff - please tread with care, WW2, also mentions of suicide, but still canon compliant, hurt without comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-09
Updated: 2019-01-09
Packaged: 2019-10-07 08:18:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17362376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/utrinque_paratus/pseuds/utrinque_paratus
Summary: Even on the last day before over 2400 of Great Britain’s practitioners had been flown into the heart of Nazi Germany, Thomas’ eyes had managed to hold onto at least a tiny spark of that young, mischievously grinning boy, holding a werelight above his hands, and dreaming of an innocent, adventurous future.Inspector Murville knew at that instant – seeing the eyes – that this last tiny spark had been snuffed out somewhere between the Ettersberg and the city of Cologne; left behind together with the Thomas Nightingale he had known.





	we left them behind

“Why the cellar?”

“Because most of the rooms there don’t have wooden lining on the ceiling, Sir.”

Inspector Murville halted and stared at the nurse.

“What?” His voice was filled with incredulity.

The nurse – a small woman, with light brown skin and piled up black hair under her cape – shot him a brief look, her eyes blinking rapidly for a few times. “You are from the Folly, aren’t you, Sir?”

There was a pause. But then he nodded. This was official business, and he knew that some of the sisters at St Thomas were informed about the nature of the Society of the Wise. It had become a necessity to have contacts with medical knowledge – even before the start of the War.

The nurse turned away and continued her way downstairs, before answering in a way that forebode nothing good.

“He started to throw around explosive fire during a nightmare one day ago. We thought it would be sensible to have him in a room completely made up of stone.”

Murville felt himself being amazed for a little slip of a heartbeat, because of course Thomas Nightingale would be able to produce fireballs in his sleep.

Then his insides turned to ice when the implication sunk in, and he suddenly felt a deep sense of dread growing – thinking about what exactly he was going to find.  

They continued their walk in complete silence, until the nurse stopped in front of an iron door which rather represented something you’d expect in a prison, not a hospital. The moment she reached for the handle, he had to ask.

“How is he?”

The nurse scoffed, her voice dry. “He is alive, and I’ve seen a lot worse.”

He felt his eyes narrow at the woman’s dismissive tone.

“I am quite serious, Miss.”

She froze in her motion and then shuffled around to face him, not backing down in the slightest at the sound of his clipped voice. 

“Are you a friend, Sir? Family?”

He straightened himself. The question caught him unexpected, and he considered it for a moment. His first connection would obviously be the fact that he had mentored Thomas for a few months when he first came to the London Folly after his graduation from Casterbrook. A friend of the family – to some extent, as he had gotten along rather nicely with Stanley. He had also known his sister Irene, mother to Thomas and his siblings, but not the father. He had been very disapproving towards the existence and concept of magic, and had thus only allowed his seventh child to study at Ambrose House. And Stanley had been sure that this had only happened because he had thought Thomas to be expendable, of a sort – four older sons were quite enough to share and inherit the duties of a household.

In all those years since he had first been introduced to Thomas, a bright-eyed young boy, grinning over his whole face and holding a werelight over his outstretched palm just two days after the lux  _formae_  had been initially presented to him – not once did he hear him speak of his father voluntarily. Just his mother.

Irene had died five years ago, one week after Thomas had been parachuted behind enemy lines in one of the earliest SOE operations. He returned two months later, and after hearing of his mothers’ demise, only stayed for five days instead of his three weeks of granted rest allowance before volunteering for the next Secret Mission.  

Thomas had continued like this, and the masters of the Folly had approved – even started to assign him to Operations without asking him first; always the most dangerous – the most prestigious; because they knew that Thomas would always turn them around into wins, which would again cast good light onto the Folly.

Even when the Masters received a telegram that the SS had put a price of 50000 Reichsmark on his head.

Thomas had never complained. Nobody had ever stepped in.

Then Arnhem happened.

When he came home suddenly everyone realised how thin he had become, how his hands had started to tremble when he thought that nobody watched; and everyone heard him proclaim forcefully – desperately, even - that, after the disaster of Operation Market Garden, not even 60 miles behind enemy lines, Operation Spatchcock would be a straight suicide run.

Barely anyone had listened. And those who did – like Murville himself – had not spoken up enough.

“I am an interested person. As someone who should have protected him, but did not,” he said, bitterness in his words, and feeling all of his 74 years’ worth of life dragging down his shoulders.

The nurse grew still, taking him in. When she spoke again, her voice had turned softer.

“He will survive. The shot wound got slightly infected, which is what the doctors in the field hospital were most worried about. But he pulled through, and the infection is getting better, which is a miracle in its own right, considering.”

_Considering he had to put another 50 miles behind him after a bullet tore through his body._

That much had been written in the report forwarded by Patrick Caffrey, who – together with Hugh Oswald, and two others - had been separated from Thomas at the ambush.

Apparently, a dozen werewolves had caught up with them.

“Otherwise, it’s just the regular little things. Some bruises, some burns, some cuts, a few cracked rips. Nothing that won’t heal in a month, which is more than most soldiers can say about themselves,” she said and shot him a weak, tight-lipped smile, and Murville thought about all those young men who would never walk again because their legs had been ripped off by mines and grenades.

“And at least, he is not constantly screaming - actually, he isn’t saying anything at all.” The nurse opened the door.

“Try to get some food or water into him if you can,” she suggested, before leaving him to his own devices – probably off to see some poor lad who needed her attention far more than him and someone who did not constantly see a bloody battlefield before his inner vision, and heard bombs go off all around him.

Murville stepped into the room, and suddenly had to think of the fireballs, and how this was probably Thomas’ alternative to screaming his throat raw in whatever his dreams beckoned him with; because The Nightingale had never been one for shouting, or heaven forbid, crying out loud.

The door fell shut with an ominous clank.

He flinched, but thankfully, the figure on the bed didn’t move. It would have been the very last thing he’d wanted – to disturb him.

Slowly, with his feet heavy as if someone had poured plumb into his shoes, Murville made his way to the side of the bed. The room was small, but nice enough, all things considered – dry and comfortably warm, even. Someone had put up a low-powered lightbulb on a little nightstand, dipping everything in a slightly flickering, orange hue.

He sat down on a wooden stool left behind by someone else and took a deep breath.

“Hello, Thomas.”

There was no reaction, or at least nothing he could discern. Thomas’ head was turned away, the sheets drawn up to his shoulders. Only his left arm was visible, positioned next to his body, palm turned upwards and the skin partly peeling off or glistening with bright red spots. Typical wounds for producing high energy fireballs in an uncontrolled manner – or under extremely high pressure.

The rest of the limb was mottled with fading bruises, a myriad of purple, yellow and green in randomly placed forms and shapes and in stark contrast to the marble white of his skin; as if someone had tried to paint on him but then decided to leave the drawing incomplete.

He felt himself growing increasingly grateful that he could not see the rest of Thomas’ body.

The silence continued, and he tried again.

“Thomas, I am here on behalf of the Folly,” he began, and promptly realised how bad that sounded, so he quickly added, “and of course, I wanted to come and see you for myself.”

Actually, he hadn’t been the primary person the Masters had asked to go and see how Nightingale was – or, how they’d put it, to “statement” him. Obviously, David Mellenby had been asked first.

When Murville had seen the two together at Casterbrook – a rather unusual friendship, since Mellenby had been three forms above Thomas, not even considering their so fundamentally different interests and characters – he thought that nothing would ever be able to separate the boys. But adulthood did its due, and with their vastly contrasting paths of work – Mellenby mostly sitting in the lab and committed to science and research, while Thomas had been sauntering across the colonies fulfilling Missions for the Foreign Secretary – their differences manifested in a way that formed a reasonable gap between the pair. Although, nothing that could not be bridged and reached out across. As far as he knew, they always stayed in touch and wrote to each other whilst being apart; and shared kind moments and long talks when Thomas had been staying at the Folly. When they made their way to the lab together, Mellenby frequently asking Thomas to help him with his ingenious experiments by doing the sort of complicated and precise - and generally explosive - spellwork only he could perform, intense clattering and bangs could be expected to be heard echoing through the whole building at Russel Square for several hours. Always followed by loud laughter.

That, at least, had never changed since their days at Ambrose House, and once, Stanley had told him about his nephews’ fiery exploitations - with a great deal of exasperation, but also fondness, in his voice. _“Imagine if they were one person. Someone with Mellenbys experimental genius, and our Thomas’ skill and aptness to setting his surroundings on fire.”_ Stanleys laugh ghosted through his head – like a breeze carrying the sweet scent of innocence and better times. _“He could be our salvation, or much rather, would level the whole of the Empire in one week.”_

But when Mellenby had been approached this morning, looking very pale and like he hadn’t slept for several days, he had blanched to an even more terrible grey seemingly just thinking about the prospect of seeing his friend in hospital, and after a few stammered words of excuse, had turned around and vanished back into his lab.

Murville knew that Thomas had switched places with him on one of the few remaining gliders.

Maybe it was a guilty conscience – or whatever Mellenby was retrieving from the researches into the Nazi documents made him feel unable to face such an emotionally draining meeting.

Most probably, both.

“I am very happy to see that you managed… to come back,” Murville forced himself to continue, and did not so much as try to hide the strain in his words. Pretending would only make him sound like a hypocrite.

 _‘To be all right’_ , had been the first thing he wanted to say – but that would have been like spitting into Thomas' face. _‘To be alive’_ would have been his second choice – now that was horrible even in his ears, and he was not very good with emotions, or comfort talk. Maybe marrying and having children would have helped with that; softening up his hard bearings. But alas, he never had, and now, it was too late; all his years wasted away with magic and conforming to an upper-class gentleman’s club – and not to forget, his service to the Metropolitan Police.

He had tried to convince the twenty-year-old Thomas to start a career into the Met, under his tutelage, instead of taking up the offer of the Foreign Ministry. He was sure that he would have filled the rank of Chief Inspector by now, if he would have agreed - with all his intensity and focus for everything he put his hands on. And maybe, as a man bound to the service of the London police, he wouldn’t have had to fight a single battle in the War. But what could the prospect of the Met even hold against the possibility of seeing the whole world – especially for a young man with high hopes for life, and barely freed of the confines of a boarding school?

He had never blamed Thomas for his decision, and it felt like a stab to Murvilles' heart to see what it had brought him.

There was still no reaction, and Murville found himself growing more uncomfortable with every second. He passed a minute with taking in more details of his surroundings – there was a little bouquet of assorted February flowers sitting in a vase next to the lightbulb, and the ends of a fine woollen blanket stuck out under the hospital sheets. He suspected the good deeds of one of Thomas’ sisters, Alice – a bold journalist living in Hackney, alone with her daughter Mary. She had gotten divorced from her husband in 1941, one year after giving birth, and thus, as Thomas had once sarcastically put it, had become the second disgrace of the Nightingale family – with him being the first, of course, what with magic and still not having found a respectable woman to marry to begin with. Not that he would have lacked the attention of the ladies, of course – but he always seemed rather satisfied with his status as a middle-aged bachelor.

Murville presumed, but he was not sure. There had been this one time in 1938 when he had been on night patrol and accidentally ran into Thomas sitting closely with a man he had suspected being from India, going by his choice of clothes and colour of skin – in a pub that no self-respecting upper-class gentleman would ever willingly set foot in. But that had probably been exactly what Thomas had been counting on, and he had never been precisely of this sort, as opposed to common belief.

They seemed happy enough, conversing in low murmur and with Thomas slightly blushing in the candlelight – looking more like a sixteen-year-old schoolboy than a man hardened by battle and fast approaching his forties.

He left them to it and never asked Thomas about the incident. It was not his to know, or pry.  

He felt like he was prying, now – with Thomas lying before him unmoving, looking as if all his life's force had been sucked out of him. Almost vulnerable - his hair shorn short in a typical paratroopers’ cut, and greying at the temples.

The complete contrary to the person he had seen in the pub seven years ago.

One second, he played with the thought of simply standing up and walking out again. He could come back on a later day, when Thomas was… better. Maybe he was sleeping, or too high on morphine to even hear him.

But he remembered the nurse’s words, and he would not try to find an excuse - he would not allow himself to simply run away from a harsh confrontation with reality. He – and by extension, the Folly – owed Thomas that much at the barest minimum. To look directly at what they had done.

And then, he got an idea how he may be able to communicate with Thomas, or at least give him some familiar comfort.

In hindsight and speaking from the position that he was a seasoned police officer, it might have been the worst idea he had ever had.

“ _Lux_ ,” he said, and produced a small werelight, in the hope that Thomas would be able to feel his _signare_.

Thomas moved faster like he would have ever thought possible of a man who gave a good impression of being fragile enough to break into a thousand shards; only if you just gave him a slight tap.

Murville felt the marred inside of Thomas' left palm tighten around his throat, with the strength of an iron clamp, and the _formae_ for a deadly spell build even before he could see Thomas' right hand closing into a fist.

Of course it would be a fucking idiotic idea to start a spell on the bedside of a semi-unconscious soldier who had just been chased 250 miles across enemy land by other practitioners for two weeks - like prey.

The thing which saved Murville from being burned through the chest by a small high-velocity fireball was the mere fact that he reflexively braced himself against Thomas' upper body, which had shot up into a rigid semi-upright position. He must have slammed one of his hands right into the region where Thomas had been wounded by the bullet, because on the edge of his awareness, he felt Thomas’ _formae_ being torn apart as if blasted through, and then he could see his face – twisting into a grimace lit up with pain, mouth opening to scream, but only a rough breath coming out, as if something had ripped the sound away before it had been given the chance to resonate within his eardrums.

Then, the _vestigia_ rolled over him.

He had seen his fair share of terrible and also magic-related murders. He should have been prepared – unfazed by it, even.

Still, what he felt was worse than anything else he had ever sensed before.

The metallic stench of blood and human decay. A rush of bowel-emptying adrenaline and fear. The crunch of breaking bones in a body and as one stepped onto a corpse. Burning salt on the lips and suffocating dirt on the tongue. Shrill and high pitched screams of fear, gut-wrenching howls of grief, roars of anger which turned into whimpers of desperation behind a backdrop of thudding bombs, firing of guns, exploding mines, a concert of death building up into a single jarring noise which made him want to shut down his brain – _now._  

He forced himself not to go sick in the very moment, grabbed Thomas left hand and flung it down on the bed, away from his neck – away from contact. Not that it would have been necessary – the man had sunken back onto the mattress by himself, all the sudden strength diminished as rapidly as it had blazed up mere heartbeats ago.

The quietness that followed anew was an agonizing cry all in itself. Suddenly, there was an ice-cold pitch-black hole stretching out before Murville - devoid of all emotion, as if he had cut himself off from his emotions _just to function_ , and the only sensations that remained were _the intense smell of wet pine trees, of woodsmoke burning in the eyes, and the awareness of rough and soaked linen canvas on his skin._

“Thomas Nightingale,” he forced himself to speak, loudly, his voice trembling, “it is me, Inspector John Murville. You are in England, in London, in a hospital. You are home. _You are safe.”_

Thomas was staring at him, now – his grey eyes wide, shot through with red lines and glazed with fever, but at the same time dull and empty.

Even on the last day before over 2400 of Great Britain’s practitioners had been flown into the heart of Nazi Germany, Thomas’ eyes had managed to hold onto at least a tiny spark of that young, mischievously grinning boy, holding a werelight above his hands, and dreaming of an innocent, adventurous future.

Inspector Murville knew at that instant – seeing the eyes – that this last tiny spark had been snuffed out somewhere between the Ettersberg and the city of Cologne; left behind together with the Thomas Nightingale he had known.

In this moment of realisation, Thomas suddenly started to whisper - bouts of ragged, painful breaths, his words barely comprehensible.

“We left them… behind.”

Before Murville could produce an intelligible answer, Thomas continued.

“I… left them behind. All… of them.”

Murville had heard these words before, because there had been others returning, who screamed in grief over their fallen fellow friends and soldiers, wrecked by the curse of their own survival.

Some had already stuck a gun into their mouth and pulled the trigger to put themselves out of their misery. He prayed to the Lord that Thomas would not end up being one of them and would, one day, be able to live with the pain.

“Thomas,” he started softly, this time trying to keep his words steady, “you did enough. Without you, barely anyone would have gotten out of there at all. All of those coming back, they told us - “

Thomas did not seem to hear his words.

“There were corpses… everywhere… Men… Women… Elderly… Children… _By God_ – “

He sounded like every letter was a thorn he had to pull out of his body – like every word that had to be forced over the edge of his cracked lips was resembling the blade of a knife being twisted around in his stomach.

“- _children_.”

Murville wished then, that Thomas had screamed; in a foolish notion of his old, tired brain, that it might have made him sound less _broken_ ; and, because all of a sudden, he understood that Thomas wasn’t speaking of the fallen soldiers.

He was speaking of the prisoners.

The prisoners of Buchenwald – the concentration camp standing on the top of the Ettersberg.

“There was a girl – a girl… could have been… Mary,” Thomas rasped, his gaze still centred on Murvilles face, but focused on a point far beyond his reach. “She had… braids… was so – small. So… _c- cold_.”

Murville felt himself growing increasingly nauseated and frozen in place at the same time.

“We left them… to die. We… made them _– useless –_ stealing research - the Nazis... killed them - left them… behind.”

Thomas’ eyes snapped back to focus on his, then, almost pleading – waiting for an answer, a reaction – maybe even a condemnation of their actions.  

Murville wanted to say something – anything that might have comforted him, anything that would take the edge of pain and guilt away or erase the memories torturing Thomas mind.

But the words failed him.

So, he only nodded, because Thomas was right – even is his state, he spoke the truth.

There was no justification for anything that had happened, and if he was sure of a single thing, then, that he would make the Masters, and everyone else involved in Operation Spatchcock, see eye to eye with what they had done – and for what price.

Thomas stared at him, for one more moment, seemingly taking in his gesture – and then he let his eyes fall shut and went limp, _because there was nothing left._  

Murville did not know for how long he continued to sit beside Thomas. The man did not start to speak or move again – not even an attempt, as if he had become completely apathetic to the world. The only thing that told him that he was not dead were his laboured breaths, and at some point, Murville was shooed out by two nurses who came to re-dress the wounds.  

He wanted to break the silence before leaving - to not just let it stand like that, in impossible darkness. In the end, he only brushed his fingers over Thomas’ hand, in the hope that he would feel it, and it would give him… something. A thread to hold on to.

And, in an afterthought, when he walked back from St Thomas to Russel Square, heavily leaning on his cane and desperately sucking in the cold wind piercing his face to _somehow_ shake off the horrible pictures clinging like cobwebs to his eyes – words would never be enough to close this black and freezing space filled with pine, smoke and canvas; and he doubted that anything but time could heal the wounds left on Thomas’ soul.

Maybe the right person would be able to help.

But he bloody well wasn’t that person; he was merely a delusional man who should have died rather than that poor girl Thomas had seen lying on the cold and muddy grounds on the Ettersberg. But the world was cruel, in that way.

He had never felt more useless before in the whole of his long life; and thought how much he had played a part in all of this ill-natured destruction that had descended on British wizardry – and how he, or anyone else, could have possibly prevented it.

When he returned to the Folly, it was dark; and the atrium was empty. Only Sir Isaac Newtons’ face greeted him.

 _‘Scientia potestas est’ -_ The inscription read mockingly, now. Like an accusation after what they had done for the knowledge of the Nazi Research, and all the power it might have brought them.

Then, a soundless shadow moved on his side, and he knew at once who it was. Of course she would have waited for his return. Probably, she could smell Thomas scent on his clothes.

“Sorry, Molly.”

He was tired.

“But Thomas Nightingale will need some time to truly come back to us.”

**Author's Note:**

> 1) I am truly sorry. 
> 
> 2) We don't know anything about the figure of Inspector Murville (not even his first name - I have named him John) besides him being a Folly practitioner also working for the Metropolitan Police in the beginning of the 20th century. He was mentioned as the one finding Molly in a police raid on the suspicion of "white slavery" and bringing her to the Folly, and as being one of Nightingales' first Folly mentors. His character had kept being stuck with me, though; so I used him as PoV and made up some headcanon for him to fit as narrator. 
> 
> 3) This story has been heavily inspired by some truly upsetting, but also excellent discussions led on tumblr at the end of the last year. It is a sad fact that "Der große Ettersberg", a hill in the heart of thuringia sitting right next to the city of Weimar, has been the location of one of the biggest concentration camps on "original" German ground - Buchenwald. 
> 
> 4) Practically everything about Nightingales family is made up - the only thing we know about them is that he had four brothers and two sisters and had been the youngest; and that he had an uncle named Stanley who was also a practitioner. 
> 
> 5) I have a personal headcanon about Patrick Caffrey, the grandfather to Frank Caffrey, being a practitioner and fighting in the war on Thomas' side. Will maybe be explored in some more fic coming at some elusive point in the future (or not). 
> 
> 6) Nightingale's war participation with the exception of Ettersberg is also made up. Operation Market Garden at Arnhem, though, is real and has been a primarily British-led and mostly Airborne WW2 Operation in September 1944. The SOE - the Special Operations Executive (also named the Baker Street Irregulars, or Churchills secret army) had also sent teams to help. Market Garden was one of the biggest losses for the Allies in the later phase of WW2; over 16800 soldiers have been captured and/or killed by Nazi Germany. 
> 
> 7) I personally do not ship David Mellenby and Thomas Nightingale, although I harbour no bad feelings against the ship per se - they just hold more appeal to me as platonic friends. So if you want to read romance into this piece of fanfiction, feel free to do so. I for myself have a little headcanon for Nightingale/an Original Male Character, which may or may not be explored in fic at a later point.
> 
> 8) We also do not know if Nightingale was sent to the hospital of St Thomas, only that he had been sent to "some" hospital. But I found it poetic irony that he'd be treated at St Thomas because of the name. 
> 
> 9) We also do not know if he was shot at/after Ettersberg or at some other point in the war, but I obviously took A LOT of creative liberties. Still, this should be canon compliant up to and including Lies Sleeping, because we literally have no hard facts on Nightingales past and his personal relationships to other persons at all.
> 
> As always, please take note that English is not my native language and that this has no beta. If you find noticeable errors in spelling and/or grammar, feel free to point them out to me! :)


End file.
